Chris Metlzer - Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
The Salton Sea is a man-made body of water created in 1901 after developers diverted water from the Colorado River and created a prosperous farming community in the Imperial Valley. Silt created by run-off from the farms blocked water entries to the canals, so engineers made cuts to allow the water to flow through, which caused flooding in the valley. Because of the silt, the Salton Sea was a salt water body that did not evaporate. In the 1950s, it was stocked with water in an effort to turn it into a beach resort with fishing opportunities and a high-priced retirement community, but tragedy kept striking — floods returned, followed by two tropical storms, decimating the property, while an over-abundence of algae have caused massive fish die-offs and the 1990s saw thousands of birds die in a plague of avian botulism.
Christopher Metzler co-directed “Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea” with Jeff Springer as a way of exploring the community and telling a story that he felt had fallen way off other people’s radar. The sea itself has a 100-year history in California — the simple story is that the Salton Sea is a failed resort town that could’ve been Las Vegas if not for some ecological problems. If was championed by Sonny Bono prior to his death, and discussion about saving it continued.
It’s a huge body of water and yet Metzler only ever discovered the place by accident.
JM: How did you first become aware of the Salton Sea?
CM: I grew up in the midwest, so my knowledge of the Salton Sea didn’t start until more recently — in fact, I think that’s one of the things that threw me into the project, because I was on a road trip one time through Southern California and made a few wrong turns and ended up at the Salton Sea. Given how weird the place, the idea of water in the desert, especially such a huge body of water, it took be aback, then I fell in love with the place. The Salton Sea was this old failed resort town that I had come upon in the late ‘90s and after Sonny Bono died, there was all this discussion about saving the Salton Sea and that was the impetus for going and telling the Salton Sea stories. We thought that anything could happen, it could be this tremendous success along the lines of Las Vegas or it could be just be this big boondoggle and either one could be an interesting story. So it was all accidental and a lot of things in the documentary are completely serendipitous.
JM: Did you meander a bit that first time?
CM: I meandered for about half a day, just exploring the shoreline. When I stumbled on the Salton Sea, I didn’t understand its history, I didn’t know what it was. It sounds really naive now, but I thought I had discovered some atomic test site. You had all these flooded shorelines and buildings and things, and I had done the not smart thing of going out there in the middle of summer when it’s 120 degrees out. I didn’t see anyone who lived down there, because they were all inside, but it kind of felt like this 1950s suburban ghost town and, as a filmmaker, how can you not fall in love with a place like that, because it’s weirdly beautiful. You really just feel like the colors are so bright and vivid and everything’s melting around there, it’s like an LSD trip without having to worry about the drug thing. It’s just an otherwordly place, like very few other places I’ve seen in my travels.
I just kind of passed it off as “oh, that’s a really cool place,” but it remained burnt in my memory and later on, I went and shot a short film down there and a music video, just taking advantage of the Salton Sea as a backdrop, not very much about the history, but after being there, quickly learning about the Salton Sea boom as a recreational area in the ‘50s and ‘60s — suprisingly enough, it was more popular than Yosemite National Park until the ‘70s, I was fascinated by how a place that was so popular could evaporate from the public’s consciousness.
JM: When was your first encounter with a person there?
CM: I guess that would probably be on some of my regular trips for the short film, I see Leonard Knight, the folk artist in the middle of the desert building this giant monument to adobe and paint. I’d see him driving around and I quickly learned after meeting him that any place that would allow someone to build a mountain out of basically nothing is a pretty special place, but what we discovered as we started meeting people down there is that the Salton Sea is a place where it’s unfortunate that people don’t know it exists, but in a way it’s given people the freedom to pursue life as they choose it, so that means Leonard can build a mountain, or there’s Donald, the Christian nudist you see on the side of the road everyday for eight hours, waving at people naked, or there’s Hunky Daddy, the Hungarian revolutionary, fought in the Hungarian revolution in 1966 and came to the United States because they found a place for him. It’s filled with eccentric and eclectic who really feel that this is a place where they can be themselves. And that was the reason I fell for the place.
JM: When you got there did people just introduce themselves? How did you gather the cast?
CM: We didn’t have an preconceived ideas of what we wanted to accomplish with the film other than a portrait of the different sorts of people you might find around the Salton Sea and share their life stories about why they live there. When we first went down there, we thought it would really be difficult to meet people because you assume that people are living in the middle of nowhere primarily because they don’t want to interact socially with other people and we know that the Salton Sea has gotten a bad rap in the traditional media as being the site of an ecological disaster, which wasn’t true, but we thought there might be a lot of bitterness because of that. What we soon realized is that it’s very easy to meet people and they’re very loving and friendly and they would just come up to us on the street and say “Hey, what are you guys doing here?” “Well, we’re making a documentary about the Salton Sea.” “Oh, really, well I’ve been here since 1955.” “You mind if we interview you?”
People were really forthcoming and that’s one of the things we liked about the Salton Sea and is very different from most other small desert communities, it’s a population that celebrates individuality but also appreciates community at the same time.
JM: Since you stopped filming, what’s happened with government projects or revitalization?
CM: When the film ends, the Salton Sea is being threatened by different water transfers, large communities near San Diego want to take the water from the Salton Sea and dry it up and use that water for their swimming pools and golf courses and other associated amenities. Since that time, there’s been a little additional hope for the Salton Sea that at least it can be saved — but while the people of the Salton Sea remain optimistic, the outcome probably isn’t good just because given all the population growth that’s happened in California over the last couple decades, they’re looking for water and the Salton Seas seems to be a place to steal it from. More than likely, it won’t be around for more than another decade. So if people have the chance to jump in the car and go check out the Salton Sea, they should do it, they should see this special place before it disappears.
JM: Once it’s a total desert with no lake, do any of them plan to stick around anyhow, or is that just going to be totally impossible?
CM: The irony of drying up the Salton Sea is that in some ways people think that’s the way to take care of the ecological disaster that the Salton Sea is, but strangely enough, draining the Salton Sea will create greater, catastrophic environmental consequences, because the air is very windy and it will create dust storms, with the Salton Sea an hour south of Palm Springs, it would wreak havoc on Palm Springs, so after it’s all said and done, the people of Palm Springs are not going to be very happy with it.
The people of the Salton Sea, most of them plan on sticking around no matter what happened and regardless of the consequences. A few years down, as the situation becomes more complicated, it’s unlikely that they’ll stay around, we’re talking about a primarily elderly population, a lot of people in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s and, just thinking of the average life expectancy, more than likely the Salton Sea won’t fail in their lifestyle, so in a way they’re going to enjoy the Salton Sea up until their very last breath, I think. There isn’t a lot of long term planning going on, they’ve kind of accepted their fate, I guess.
JM: It does have the quality of a refugee area anyhow, so it does make it all seem very day to day.
CM: That’s a different way than I, myself, choose to live my life, but there is something really simple about it in that everybody in the town lives day to day, you wake up in the morning, go out to the pier, do some fishing, hang out with your friends, it’s basically one long holiday. It’s so cheap to live there that people can achieve that existence. That doesn’t mean that the living conditions are all that great, but people give it their own spin that they have what they feel they need and they don’t really feel they’re wanting anything.
JM: In many ways it has the same spirit of a frontier town and I think the country is probably scattered with little places like it.
CM: The Salton Sea isn’t an anomaly. The people or sort of lifestyle is universal in these small, forgotten towns all across America. I think that’s one of the great things about America. Sometimes you get the feeling that America’s being lost in this suburban monoculture, the spreading outdoor shopping mall, everyone travels within their own development. That’s a large part of American society, but once you get out there on the road, you find that places like the Salton Sea are still large parts of the American culture, just ones that we with the more ordinary lives don’t always interact with — and that’s me included. I live in San Francisco, I’m early 30-something, and that’s the kind of people I hang out with and have all my life. I have a fairly normal life back home. It’s once you’re on the road that you get to live a different kind of life than your day-to-day existence – that’s what makes traveling fun and that’s what makes filming fun, when you go off to make a film and explore these stories that aren’t necessarily a part of you but through making the film, they do become a part of who you are.
JM: What sorts of experiences did you have that might have shaped your drive to travel?
CM: Where I grew up in rural Missouri, I appreciate it and go back quite frequently, but living in the midwest and recognizing that there are a variety of different places out their in parts of the country and the world, I guess the curiosity was just ingrained in me. After being in one place for 18 years, it was like “Well, I think I’ve gotten a chance to get a rough sketch of what’s available here, so why don’t I go check out what’s around the corner?” The midwest is far from all the same, but some of my reaction is probably that a lot of people in the midwest, like a lot of other places, content with the lifestyle and places they have, whereas I couldn’t figure out how you could be content without checking out other places that are out there.
JM: When you go back do you notice the weirdness of your own home in ways that you didn’t before you left?
CM: I think whenever I return home, it seems that there’s this place that you already knew that were weird, but you realize there was a whole lot more weird going on than you expected or that you were aware of. “How in the world could I not notice this place, I lived here for 18 years?” Obviously that’s just growing into an adult and having a car, so you have more things to look at, but I think also an awareness, as you grow older you begin to recognize the other things that are out there. When you’re younger, everything gets painted in a larger brush.
JM: It’s not the vogue for people to go on vacation and discover the cultures they’re visiting in their own country or get to know odd and interesting places — people seem to go for the more prepackaged getaways.
CM: Look at how the road trip has evolved. You go from these two lane highways like Route 66 to larger more efficient interstates which obviously speed up travel and make things more efficient, but at the same time exploration is a little bit more limited. I think there’s a rediscovery process going on about what the road trip can be, and that’s exciting that people are beginning to appreciate the lost art of the road trip.
One of the difficult lines that towns have had to straddle is how do you maintain the essence of who you are without becoming a community that exists solely for tourists. The Salton Sea is going to have to deal with those issues if it winds up being successful. Even now in its decrepit state, the Salton Sea is attracting lots of tourists because of the beautiful decay. The sort of environment that exists in the Salton Sea isn’t something that most places allow to exist and that makes the Salton Sea unique. I think that most of us, even if we consider ourselves travelers, we’re more game to go outside our own country to check out places and the culture there than our own country. I’m not sure where that temptation comes from, but it seems to be across the board that we’d rather leave than go look inside.
JM: Does the Salton Sea get that many tourists? How do they deal with it? It seems ill-equipped for it.
CM: The Salton Sea was built around this weekend holiday crowd. People would own homes and spend their weekends out there in fishing boats, you’d have this large influx of tourists on weekends and that’s how things survived. Since then, really what you do is have these stragglers like myself who decide to get off the interstate at the wrong ramp and stumble upon it and you have this motley collection of artists and photographers, hipsters from Brooklyn, who have heard about this mythical place the Salton Sea and want to go check it out for a more fetishized urban experience sort of thing.
What’s kind of interesting is that due to some of the success of the film, there are lots of people who decide to go check out the site, the film serving as a catalyst. And in a way that’s been really great, even the small trickle there helps out the community, but I was talking to Hunky Daddy a couple weeks ago and he’s getting a visitor every other day. People come town and they’re like “Where’s Hunky Daddy?” And I was like “Hunky Daddy, if this becomes overwhelming and gets to be too much, let me know,” and he was like “No, you don’t do that man, Hunky Daddy likes his fans!” I thought it was just amazing that he’s getting visitors just because we screen the film so frequently now. There was just something very unusual about the idea that these ordinary people who decided to share their lives with us have become a tourist draw.
JM: Are you conflicted about that? Do you see any down sides to people showing up?
CM: My only concern about it all is that they’re able to maintain the privacy that they had before, but I guess what I realized is that I overvalued that. They’re really are no negative consequences to it. When people come down to the Salton Sea, the local people get a kick out of it, because they just appreciate these people coming out to love the Salton Sea the way that it is and not try to change it. The other aspect is that with some of the people I know who moved out to the Salton Sea because they saw the movie, these new younger community members out there are what’s going to help establish a population base that the Salton Sea needs to continue after the older people have passed away. You’re going to need that, so in a way, the film has served as a catalyst in legitimizing the Salton Sea as a place where you can live and pursue life as you want it — people of all ages. I was concerned at first but what I quickly learned was that it’s all good and anything that brings the Salton Sea into a larger public sphere is great because for too long, the Salton Sea has sat in the background and nobody being aware that it’s there, it suffered because people weren’t aware.
It wasn’t the reason Jeff and I made the film, we didn’t want to turn the Salton Sea into a big tourist draw or raise awareness of the environmental issues, we just that thought this was a really cool place and we thought there was great story here to tell, and we also wanted to capture this moment in time before everything changed, good or bad. That was all it was, we thought it would be a hell of a fun film to make, and whatever happens with it afterwards was left up in the air.
JM: You know people who moved there after seeing the film? What are they like?
CM: Not a huge number, probably half a dozen people so far and other people who have bought land. There are people who come to a screening and say “Oh, that looks like a great place to live, that’s right up my alley,” then they give you a call or e-mail you afterwards asking for the Land Man’s phone number and he’ll hook them up with land or ask for a suggestion about the terrain around the Salton Sea and then I get a postcard a couple months later that says “Guess what? Guess where I’m living!” A lot of it is the affordability, it’s very cheap to live near the Salton Sea. It’s particularly cheap compared to other housing prices in the rest of California, but it’s not the economic aspect, people say. There’s something that syncs up with people’s personalities, they say “This is the place I’ve always been looking for.” With the new residents and with most of the people we talk to in the film who have lived at the Salton Sea for a long period of time, you realize that most of them tried to live in the city or in a suburban community and they just didn’t feel comfortable there and they were always looking for that place that grounds them and suits their lifestyle — and for some people, the Salton Sea is that. Never in my wildest imagination did I think that would happen. It just puts a big smile on your face.
JM: Are they mostly creative types?
CM: Most the people who have either moved up or bought land are creative types, a mixture of younger people but also baby boomer people nearing retirement who are kind of creative, the kind of artsy person you might find moving up to the more rural areas of New England sometimes, but it’s more affordable. The Salton Sea, while it’s a rural area, it’s only two and a half hours away from Los Angeles, it seems like it’s far away from anything else in the world. And there’s agriculture there, which seems contradictory, because it’s in the middle of the desert. It does seem like there are lots of people who do move out to rural areas to pursue the arts, partly based on recognizing the beauty in allowing things to age — which is a little bit different from the rest of the United States tearing down its historical buildings — and appreciating the beauty of this failed resort town or aging industrial town. It’s all about reinvention sometimes, there’s lots of creativity there that can be exciting.
JM: Do you have any temptation to purchase a place there?
CM: My temptation is a lot larger now than when I was making the film, because when I was making the film, it wasn’t very practical in a DIY film sort of a way. We were wondering where we were going to get the money to finish the film. It sounds really silly now, but being able to buy a lot for $300 just wasn’t within our budget. Since that point in time, I’ve thought about buying some land at the Salton Sea, but in the last year or two, there’s been kind of a boom in the land at the Salton Sea, where they’ve become a little bit unaffordable to myself. Second of all, I also recognize it for the speculative bubble that it is.
JM: I notice you sell dead tilapia fish. How are they selling — and how do you do that?
CM: At different times of the year, you have these catastrophic fish die offs where 10 or 15 million fish die in a day, so you can imagine what that does to the tourism in the area. One of the great things is that in addition to creating this apocalyptic scenario, you have all these dead fish on the shoreline and because it’s a desert, they dry out really quickly, they look like a fossilized fish. We’ve taken on the artistic pursuit of going and collecting a lot of dead tilapia, shellacking them and framing them. We sell them off our Web site, it’s our own little bit of Salton Sea art. Each fish has its own neat elements and you don’t have to worry about the smell because it’s dried out. It’s my own fascination with taxidermy turned inside out, I guess. They’ve actually sold pretty well. We just sold two dead tilapia to a gentleman who gave them to his son and daughter-in-law as a wedding gift, which I thought was pretty cool. We didn’t know how exactly they were going to go, but there’s a larger market for framed, dead talapia than I ever imagined. It’s a nice side business to be in.
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Tags: Christopher Metzler, documentaries, ecological disaster, environmental issues, Hunky Daddy, industrial decay, Salton Sea, Sonny Bono, tilapia
You can check out the trailer for the film here:
http://www.saltonseadoc.com/